Gee, uh, why ever would the Bush Administration
want to stubbornly deny climate change?http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1222706,00.html
"A classic example is that of West Virginia coal
baron James Harless, a Pioneer in 2000 and 2004,
therefore contributing at least $200,000 to the Bush
campaign. He saw his grandson appointed to a Department
of Energy team looking at drawing up new policies.
The Bush administration then reversed a campaign
promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that
bedevil the coal industry and eased environmental
restrictions on opencast mining." Yeah, yeah,
thanks for the heads-up there – press of Britain!

(((You know what? It's been six years since
we started the Viridian Movement in 1998,
and our basic issues are finally becoming loud,
repeated, unbearably urgent, everyday,
headline-grabbing issues.

(((Much more of this, and it's going to be
time for me to declare victory and
move along to some less commonplace form
of technosocial endeavor. I don't like
to repeat the publicly obvious – not my style.
But it's not like the Greenhouse problem
is ever going away in my lifetime... So hey,
maybe they'll draft me and MAKE me do this!)))

'Only nuclear power can now halt global warming'

'The ice is melting much faster than we thought'

Guru who tuned into Gaia was one of the first to
warn of climate threat

James Lovelock: "Nuclear power is the only green solution

"We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in
imminent danger

24 May 2004

"Sir David King, the Government's chief scientist,
was far-sighted to say that global warming is a more
serious threat than terrorism. He may even have
underestimated, because, since he spoke, new evidence
of climate change suggests it could be even more
serious, and the greatest danger that civilisation has
faced so far. (((Well, yeah, if you don't count
nukes.)))

"Most of us are aware of some degree of warming;
winters are warmer and spring comes earlier. But
in the Arctic, warming is more than twice as great
as here in Europe and in summertime, torrents of melt
water now plunge from Greenland's kilometre-high
glaciers. The complete dissolution of Greenland's icy
mountains will take time, but by then the sea will
have risen seven metres, enough to make uninhabitable
all of the low lying coastal cities of the world,
including London, Venice, Calcutta, New York and Tokyo.
Even a two metre rise is enough to put most of southern
Florida under water. (((And drown their nukes, too!)))

"The floating ice of the Arctic Ocean is even more
vulnerable to warming; in 30 years, its white
reflecting ice, the area of the US, may become dark sea
that absorbs the warmth of summer sunlight, and further
hastens the end of the Greenland ice. The North Pole,
goal of so many explorers, will then be no more than
a point on the ocean surface.

"Not only the Arctic is changing; climatologists warn
a four-degree rise in temperature is enough to
eliminate the vast Amazon forests in a catastrophe
for their people, their biodiversity, and for the
world, which would lose one of its great natural air
conditioners.

"The scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change reported in 2001 that global
temperature would rise between two and six degrees
Celsius by 2100. Their grim forecast was made
perceptible by last summer's excessive heat; and
according to Swiss meteorologists, the Europe-wide
hot spell that killed over 20,000 was wholly different from any previous heat wave. The
odds against it being
a mere deviation from the norm were 300,000 to one.
It was a warning of worse to come. (((Why is it
still necessary for Dr Lovelock to get up to a
long running start like this?)))

"What makes global warming so serious and so urgent
is that the great Earth system, Gaia, is trapped in
a vicious circle of positive feedback. Extra heat
from any source, whether from greenhouse gases,
the disappearance of Arctic ice or the Amazon forest,
is amplified, and its effects are more than additive.
It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm,
and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the
fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited.
When that happens, little time is left to put out the
fire before it consumes the house. Global warming, like
a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to
act. (((So, having demonstrated our keen sense
of responsibility in setting our own house afire,
it's time to build some nuclear reactors.)))

"So what should we do? We can just continue to enjoy
a warmer 21st century while it lasts, and make
cosmetic attempts, such as the Kyoto Treaty, to hide
the political embarrassment of global warming, and
this is what I fear will happen in much of the world.
When, in the 18th century, only one billion people
lived on Earth, their impact was small enough for it
not to matter what energy source they used. (((Well,
it mattered if you died in an 18th century coal
mine.)))

"But with six billion, and growing, few options
remain; we can not continue drawing energy from
fossil fuels and there is no chance that the
renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide
enough energy and in time. If we had 50 years or
more we might make these our main sources. But we
do not have 50 years; the Earth is already so
disabled by the insidious poison of greenhouse gases
that even if we stop all fossil fuel burning
immediately, the consequences of what we have
already done will last for 1,000 years. Every year
that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for
our descendants and for civilisation.

(((You know, I sense the makings of a really good,
sensible deal here. Shut off the carbon. Destroy the
coal companies and oil companies. Use
nukes for fifty years while developing sustainable
energy. Then shut off the nukes. Become fully
sustainable. Legislate that all, worldwide, with
global diplomacy. Leave the oil and coal in the
ground. Let Al Qaeda see what the hell they get out
of life when their Holy Lands are abandoned to zealots
and they have no more actual revenue (other than the
usual enslaved women, guns and heroin). Dedicate
tremendous effort toward climate amelioration and
prevention of Greenhouse changes. And then...

(((Oh wait a minute, what the heck am I saying? Of
course we're going to burn all the carbon and
then also add a plague of nukes to a world
spinning out of political and military control.)))

"Worse still, if we burn crops grown for fuel this
could hasten our decline. Agriculture already uses
too much of the land needed by the Earth to regulate
its climate and chemistry. A car consumes 10 to 30
times as much carbon as its driver; imagine the
extra farmland required to feed the appetite of cars.
(((This has the raw feeling of back-of-the-napkin
calculation here.)))

"By all means, let us use the small input from
renewables sensibly, but only one immediately
available source does not cause global warming and
that is nuclear energy. True, burning natural gas
instead of coal or oil releases only half as much
carbon dioxide, but unburnt gas is 25 times as potent
a greenhouse agent as is carbon dioxide. Even a small
leakage would neutralise the advantage of gas.
(((As opposed to the small leakages of nuclear power,
which are a kind of health tonic.)))

"The prospects are grim, and even if we act
successfully in amelioration, there will still be hard
times, as in war, that will stretch our grandchildren
to the limit. We are tough and it would take more than
the climate catastrophe to eliminate all breeding pairs
of humans; what is at risk is civilisation. As
individual animals we are not so special, and in
some ways are like a planetary disease, but through
civilisation we redeem ourselves and become a precious
asset for the Earth; not least because through our eyes
the Earth has seen herself in all her glory. (((Oh,
come on, James! Isn't it bad enough that we
have to swallow nukes without this cornball
Gaian burst of mystic scientism?)))

"There is a chance we may be saved by an unexpected
event such as a series of volcanic eruptions severe
enough to block out sunlight and so cool the Earth.
(((How about "global dimming"? Flavor o' the month!)))
But only losers would bet their lives on such poor
odds. (((As opposed to betting our lives on nukes;
cuddly objects which have never threatened human
survival before.))) Whatever doubts there are about
future climates, there are no doubts that greenhouse gases and temperatures both are
rising.

"We have stayed in ignorance for many reasons;
important among them is the denial of climate change
in the US where governments have failed to give their
climate scientists the support they needed. (((Yep!
And you know what else? We're swarming with
warheads!))) The Green lobbies, which should have given
priority to global warming, seem more concerned about
threats to people than with threats to the Earth, not
noticing that we are part of the Earth and wholly
dependent upon its well being. (((Hey man, macrobiotic
diet freaks have to vote somewhere.))) It may take a
disaster worse than last summer's European deaths to
wake us up. (((Okay – how about a massive terrorist
oil spike? Got one in the wings, just waitin'!)))

"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational
fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies
and the media. (((No it isn't.))) These fears are
unjustified, (((oh no they're not))) and nuclear
energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the
safest of all energy sources. (((If you don't count
the nuclear energy released over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, that is.))) We must stop fretting over the
minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or
radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer
anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that
all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. (((Look, we've been
breathing oxygen since the origin of our species, and a third of us have not historically
died of cancer.)))

"If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real
danger, which is global warming, we may die even
sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from
overheating in Europe last summer.

"I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the
world in the quality of its Earth and climate
scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and
prefers to listen to the Greens. But I am a Green and
I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their
wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy. (((Okay –
let's say your argument has convinced me. So
get me a written quid pro quo that actually cuts
carbon emissions way past Kyoto limits, and I'll
risk the Chernobyls. Do you have the clout to
give us one of those – or would you rather just
pester hippies, Hollywood, and reporters?)))

"Even if they were right about its dangers, and they
are not, its worldwide use as our main source of energy
would pose an insignificant threat compared with the
dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea
levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world.
We have no time to experiment with visionary energy
sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to
use nuclear – the one safe, available, energy
source – now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted
by our outraged planet."

The writer is an independent scientist and the creator
of the Gaia hypothesis of the Earth as a self-
regulating organism.
25 May 2004 22:26

GBN Global Perspectives

–Gwynne Dyer

James Lovelock, Nuclear Power and Global Warming

"Unless we stop now, we will really doom the lives of
our descendants. If we just go on for another 40 or 50
years faffing around, they'll have no chance at all,
it'll be back to the Stone Age. There'll be people
around still. But civilisation will go."

James Lovelock, 'The Independent', 24 May

When James Lovelock calls for a massive
expansion in nuclear power generation to ward off
the worst effects of climate change, as he did in a
front-page article in 'The Independent' this week,
you have to pay attention.

(((Unless you're an oil company executive. Or a
member of the Bush Administration. But I repeat
myself.)))

The future may view him as the most important
scientist of the twentieth century, and he is revered
by the Green movement, which hates nuclear energy. But
now he writes: "Every year that we continue burning
carbon makes it worse for our descendants and for
civilisation....I am a Green, and I entreat my friends
in the movement to drop their wrongheaded
objection to nuclear energy."

Lovelock is an independent scientist who grew wealthy by inventing equipment to measure the presence
of CFCs, the chemicals used in spray cans and
refrigerators that were destroying the ozone layer
before they were banned. But his real claim to fame,
on a par with Darwin's and Galileo's, was his insight
that the Earth is a living system.

He often regrets having named
that system 'Gaia'
(after the Greek goddess of the Earth), because the
Green movement and various New Agers started using it
as a beautiful metaphor, and delayed its acceptance as
a valid scientific observation for several decades.
But it is finally being accepted by the scientific
community worldwide (with a name change to Earth
System Science to placate the guardians of academic
orthodoxy): last December the scientific journal
'Nature' gave Lovelock two pages to summarise recent
developments in the field. (((I wonder if he burbled
anything about us humans being the "eyes" through
which Gaia "has seen herself in all her glory.")))

Lovelock has always been worried
about radical
climate change, because the essence of the Gaia
hypothesis is that the current composition
of the Earth's air and seas – the global temperature
regime, the salinity of the oceans, even the proportion
of oxygen in the atmosphere – has been shaped over the
eons by the activity of living things. Our planet
would be radically different, he argues, if living
things did not actively maintain the status quo that is
so hospitable to life. (((Maybe global dimming is
really – beneficent Gaian space plankton! Wow!)))

The concept of Gaia is no more
mystical than the
notion that triple-canopy tropical jungles create a
local micro-climate under their leafy ceiling. (((So
that the marmosets can see the great mahoganies in all
their glory.)))The emerging 'earth system science'
just studies the hugely more complex system of
biological interactions and feedbacks, involving
millions of species, that has evolved over several
billion years to optimise conditions on Earth for
living things. (((Yeah, and you know what they need
now? Lotsa plutonium!)))But this system that can
lurch into massive change if some major input (like the
proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) is
changed.

Recent evidence, including last
summer's
unprecedented heat wave in Europe and new data on the
speed that the Greenland ice cap is melting,
has persuaded Lovelock that global warming is now
moving far faster than most studies anticipated, and
will have calamitous effects on key support
systems of human civilisation like food production in
decades rather than centuries. He doesn't believe that
current efforts to reduce the output of
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases through the
Kyoto accord (which has still to be ratified, in any
case) and the encouragement of power generation by
wind, wave and solar power can possibly cut carbon
emissions enough in time.

(((How about the relatively simple solution of
seven or eight billion of us starving to death?
Or how about a few massive heat-wave-boosted
lethal epidemics? That ought to put a swift
kibosh on energy demand.)))

"'I think we should think of ourselves as a bit like we were in 1938,' he said. (He's 84, so he
remembers.) 'There was a war looming, and
everybody knew it, but nobody really knew what the hell
to do about it.' (((So they had an atomic war.
Hey, great precedent!)))

"The Kyoto protocol, he said, is 'the perfect analogy for the Munich agreement,' because it would
solve nothing: the cuts it mandates in
greenhouse gases are tiny, while it lets politicians
look like they are doing something.'And the Greens'
attachment to renewable energy is 'well-intentioned,
but misguided, like the left's attachment to
disarmament in 1938.' (((Maybe they should have
gone gung-ho for nuclear power in 1938, in which
case, Hitler would have had the Bomb.)))

"So the man who was among the first to warn of climate change says that there should be a massive
expansion of nuclear power, which produces
hardly any carbon, to deal with the inevitable growth
of demand for power without toppling the world into
climate change so abrupt and extreme that
it would cause a massive human die-off. The problems
of radioactive waste and the danger of nuclear
accidents are minuscule by comparison, and there
is no third alternative. (((Well, the third
alternative is a wrecked industrial economy
and a massive human die-off, but it's a
little hard to sit down and dash out a cheery
editorial on that subject.)))

Only France and Japan among the developed countries get most of their electrical power from nuclear energy.
No new nuclear power plants have been built in the
United States or Britain for over twenty years: the
'fear factor' linked to the accidents at Three Mile
Island and Chernobyl killed the market dead. (((Also
the cost, and the lack of any place to dump the garbage.)))But those were local disasters that caused
limited local damage, not massive and irreversible
changes for the worse in the whole planetary
environment, and with better design and more attention
to safety they might have been avoided. (((And, with a
slightly tenser international situation, we might
have been having Global Warming plus Nuclear Winter!)))

"Would we be on the brink of massive climate change now if the nuclear power industry had continued to
replace fossil-fuel-burning plants at the rate we
expected in the late 1950s and early 1960s? Almost
certainly not. We'd have a much smaller problem, and
more time to deal with it. James Lovelock has done us
all a favour: this debate is long overdue. (((I
question whether we're on the "brink" of anything –
climate change is happening. Furthermore, if we'd
built swarms of nukes in the 50s and somehow avoided
Armageddon, gas would be so cheap that the roads
would swarm with massive Recreational Vehicles
instead of SUVs.)))

(((This nuclear nostalgia is all well and good, but what we need is genuine industrial policy
agreed on by the powers-that be. A new Kyoto, genuine
international agreement with coherent steps to
deal with the menace. Otherwise we just glow
in the dark as we die of the heat, and what's
the point of that?)))

The Global Perspectives series is intended to challenge
and provoke the thinking of GBN members.
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of GBN or its members.
We welcome suggestions of other writers and columnists whose ideas we might share.

Have Colleagues, Will Subscribe

The Global Perspectives series is a proprietary service for current GBN members.
Please feel free to share
these columns with any co-workers who you think might
be interested. If you have colleagues who are
interested in receiving Global Perspectives, or if
you or any of your colleagues need access to the GBN
web site, please
send an e-mail to: access@gbn.com

If you have any questions or comments about the Global
Perspectives series, please contact Nancy Murphy at
nmurphy@gbn.com